Why don’t women use artificial intelligence?
Be more productive. That is how ChatGPT, a generative-artificial-intelligence tool from OpenAI, sells itself to workers. But despite industry hopes that the technology will boost productivity across the workforce, not everyone is on board. According to two recent studies, women use ChatGPT between 16 and 20 percentage points less than their male peers, even when they are employed in the same jobs or read the same subject.
The first study, published as a working paper in June, explores ChatGPT at work. Anders Humlum of the University of Chicago and Emilie Vestergaard of the University of Copenhagen surveyed 100,000 Danes across 11 professions in which the technology could save workers time, including journalism, software-developing and teaching. The researchers asked respondents how often they turned to ChatGPT and what might keep them from adopting it. By exploiting Denmark’s extensive, hooked-up record-keeping, they were able to connect the answers with personal information, including income, wealth and education level.
Across all professions, women were less likely to use ChatGPT than men who worked in the same industry (see chart 1). For example, only a third of female teachers used it for work, compared with half of male teachers. Among software developers, almost two-thirds of men used it while less than half of women did. The gap shrank only slightly, to 16 percentage points, when directly comparing people in the same firms working on similar tasks. As such, the study concludes that a lack of female confidence may be in part to blame: women who did not use AI were more likely than men to highlight that they needed training to use the technology.
Another potential explanation for the gender imbalance comes from a survey of 486 students by Daniel Carvajal at Aalto University and Catalina Franco and Siri Isaksson at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH). It also found a gender gap: female students enrolled in the NHH’s only undergraduate programme were 18 percentage points less likely to use ChatGPT often. When the researchers separated students by admission grades, it became clear that the gap reflected the behaviour of mid- and high-performing women (see chart 2). Low performers were almost as likely as men to use the technology.
Why might this be? The researchers probed what was going on with some clever follow-up questions. They asked students whether they would use ChatGPT if their professor forbade it, and received a similar distribution of answers. However, in the context of explicit approval, everyone, including the better-performing women, reported that they would make use of the technology. In other words, the high-achieving women appeared to impose a ban on themselves. “It’s the ‘good girl’ thing,” reckons Ms Isaksson. “It’s this idea that ‘I have to go through this pain, I have to do it on my own and I shouldn’t cheat and take short-cuts’.”
A lack of experience with AI could carry a cost when students enter the labour market. In August the researchers added a survey of 1,143 hiring managers to their study, revealing that managers value high-performing women with AI expertise 8% more than those without. This sort of premium does not exist for men, suggesting that there are rewards for women who are willing to relax their self-imposed ban.
Tera Allas of McKinsey, a consultancy, worries that by the time AI is firmly embedded into modern working life, it might be designed to appeal more to men, who are its main users—potentially shutting women out in the long term. But not everyone is as concerned. Despite the fact that the early internet was dominated by men, for example, young American women were more online than their male counterparts by 2005. On top of this, Danielle Li of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology notes that the studies do not actually show whether men’s current ChatGPT use translates into better or more productive work. At the moment, the technology may be more of a digital toy, she says. Perhaps, then, high-achieving women are simply better at avoiding distraction. ■
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